


Roadside Assistance

by vanillafluffy



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Fix-It, Jasper Sitwell was framed, M/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-02
Updated: 2017-01-06
Packaged: 2018-09-14 03:14:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,147
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9157756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanillafluffy/pseuds/vanillafluffy
Summary: It sure looked like Sitwell was thrown into the path of that semi in The Winter Soldier. But what if that was just a really close call? And what if his involvement with HYDRA wasn't entirely voluntary?





	1. Chapter 1

It all happens so fast--one second, Jasper is in the sedan, trying to talk his kidnappers out of using him as bait, when something yanks him out of there and flings him through the air. The oncoming semi misses his face by less than an inch, then his reflexes kick in and he rolls up against the concrete traffic barrier, gasping for breath. 

Jasper can hear metal grinding and sounds of gunfire farther down the expressway. He doesn't know what attacked him, and he hasn't the slightest desire to find out. 

A white sedan, "Capitol Transport" on the side, pulls up beside him as something very loud goes BOOM in the distance. Apparently whatever is going on has blocked traffic going both ways, because the cab is the only vehicle on this side of the road. Jasper scrambles to his feet and dives into the back seat. "Get me out of here!"

It's only when the cab lurches into motion that he realizes how much he hurts. His left shoulder is a white-hot nexus of pain, and he can't move that arm at all. Breathing, usually an unconscious action, now feels like knives lacerating him with each inhalation. When he coughs, covering his mouth with his hand, there's blood on his palm when he removes it. This is not good, he tells himself. 

If Hydra is trying to kill him now, it's all been for nothing. He fumbles his phone from his pocket and calls Beryl. "That package I gave you to hold...take it...there's enough money for you to get away safely...."

"Jasper? What's wrong?" his sister demands. "What's going on?"

"It's safer if you don't know...go visit Auntie Nelda." Beryl will be safe with her godmother, he hopes. 

"Are you crazy? I can't just walk away from my job and go to Bolivia!"

"Please," Jasper begs through the growing tightness in his chest. "I've been trying to keep you safe, but I'm blown, I can't do it anymore..." He feels dizzy. Sitting upright is an effort. "Please, sweetie. Please go, be safe...."

Then darkness surrounds him. For a moment, an hour, days, he's somewhere else, although afterward he couldn't describe it, except that it was a good place. 

Jasper blinks. The car has stopped; the door beside him is open. The cab driver, wearing a tan uniform shirt with "Johnny" stitched above the pocket, is bending over him. He looks concerned, but it's okay. The pain is gone. Jasper isn't sure if it's a miracle, or if he's dying--but if he's dying, it isn't so bad. Experimentally, he takes a deep breath. It doesn't hurt. His shoulder responds to his command. It doesn't bother him, but his forearm...he looks down and there's a tire print stamped across his lower sleeve. 

"Hang on," Johnny says. He rests his right hand lightly on the shattered wrist. His blue eyes flash with blue light. Jasper feels a pulse of warmth and the pain is gone between one untroubled breath and the next. 

"You're Inhuman!" Jasper blurts, stunned. 

"That's a helluva thing to say to the guy that just saved your life," the young man comments. He seems awfully young, college-age, maybe, with tousled dirty-blond hair and an All-American boy face. He doesn't sound angry. "But you're a little concussed, so I guess you're allowed."

He reaches out, his palm against Jasper's cheek, fingertips against his temple. Again, the light in his eyes flares. Heat throbs for an instant, and Jasper's mind clears of a fog he hadn't realized was there. He's alert, and his brain starts trying to calculate how much trouble he's in. 

Johnny is regarding him, waiting for a response. "Thanks," Jasper says. "Um...hail Hydra?"

Johnny lifts his chin and stares into his eyes. "You must have gotten some crack on the head," he says. "What was all that business on the phone about you're blown?"

Jasper sighs. "I work for a government agency that's been infiltrated by an organization that wants to bring it down. I was blackmailed into joining them because they threatened my sister's life...she's the only close family I've got. I went along with it to protect her. Then somebody found out, and wanted me to betray the organization--which just tried to silence me by throwing me out of a car doing fifty. If you hadn't come along, I'd be dead...wouldn't I?" He has the feeling the young man isn't convinced by his story, but he's too tired to argue. He changes the subject. "So that's your thing, you can heal people?"

"You're not completely healed," cautions Johnny. "You're patched up, but you need to take it easy for a while. You'll probably sleep a lot for the next few days. What I do, the best I can figure it out is, I jumpstart your body into starting to heal. It takes a lot of energy out of both of us. That's the best I can do."

"That's huge. I owe you my life." Jasper feels nauseous. When--if--the helicarriers launch, there's a good chance young Johnny will have a target painted on his back. All he can do is hope Rogers and his merry pranksters have survived the freeway ambush and can come up with a workable plan. With Fury dead, he has no idea who at SHIELD can be trusted, and he's wondering if he can lay low long enough to make it out of the country. They think he's dead, right?

His door slams. He looks up to see Johnny getting back into the driver's seat. "Where are we going?"

"I'm taking you home."

"No, not good, that's the first place they'll look."

"I'm bringing you over to my place. Somebody needs to keep an eye on you while you're recuperating."

"You're a cab driver, how--?" Jasper yawns. 

"No, Capitol Transport is contracted by insurance companies to provide safe transportation to and from medical appointments. I'm only part-time, but I can do a lot of good...."

No doubt. Jasper feels his eyelids sag. 

"Mister? Come on, we're here. You'll need to climb some stairs. I can't carry you up, your ribs might splinter again. We'll take it slow."

They take it slow. Johnny lives on the fourth floor. They rest on every landing so Jasper can catch his breath. It occurs to him to introduce himself to his rescuer, and to thank him. "I'm sorry," Jasper mumbles as they plod upward again. "Causing rouble...."

"You're having a rough day," Johnny says, smiling as he unlocks the door. "Here's the couch. Easy does it...."

Aware of the younger man helping him to lay down, gently arranging a blanket over him, Jasper tries to thank him again, but he isn't sure if the words emerge before sleep descends. 

...


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> With Jasper in stable condition, Johnny has a lot more patients to deal with when the helicarriers go down and the Triskelion is breached.

His rescue guy is still snoring on the couch as Johnny Luciano gets ready to leave for his second job. As far as Johnny can see, he hasn't moved since he passed out at...2 o'clock or thereabouts. He'd been worried about Jasper for the rest of his shift at Capitol Transport. Now it's a quarter of ten, and Johnny's gift tells him the older man's condition is stable. 

It's harder to know how much of his wild story to believe. The whole "evil secret organization conspiracy" business was kind of out there. And what about that phone call, telling someone he'd claimed was his sister to get to safety? He doesn't know how much to chalk up to Jasper's concussion and how much might actually be true--this is, after all, DC. Sometimes he can "read" mental illness, though there's nothing he can do about it--but he doesn't get that sense here. For all his crazy talk, Jasper had sounded stressed (Duh!), but wholly sane. 

The stranger remains in his thoughts as he heads out. Jasper is good-looking, though Johnny's got a feeling that the man is way out of his league. Not so much because he's older--by at least a decade--his ragged suit had been well-tailored to begin with, and that phone call sounded like the pleas of a man who was used to command, not begging. Basically, he's Johnny's favorite flavor of hot, but he has a feeling it's a "Look, don't touch" situation. 

From 11 PM to 7 AM, Johnny is a paramedic. After all the mojo he expended pulling his houseguest back from the Pearly Gates, he's hoping for a quiet night. He almost gets it. 

He and Ramirez get back to the garage after a cardiac emergency that went into overtime, and they've barely pulled into the lot when Mallon, the day shift dispatcher, bolts over to their rig. "You need to go back out, fast--there's a big mess at that office tower by the bridge, it got hit by a plane or something. They're calling in every bus in town. It's bad, real bad!"

_It must be,_ Johnny thinks, because Mallon is usually in the break room having a donut or four before putting his ass in his chair and his headset on. 

He calls Capitol Transport to let them know his full-time job has commandeered him for the crisis. Maggie, their dispatcher, isn't surprised. "We've cancelled as many of our nonessential runs as we could," she reports. "If you were here, you'd be moving low-risk triage anyway. Go, save lives."

They're halfway to the Triskelion when Mallon diverts them. "An Eye spotted someone beside the river, maybe blown there by the explosion."

"Explosion?" Ramirez queries. "Thought you said it was a plane hitting the building?"

Mallon's sigh comes over the radio. "Details are sketchy." He gives them directions, and they head that way. 

"Geez," says Ramirez, and Johnny stares at the tower in the near-distance with something wedge-shaped embedded midway up, in flames. "Mallon wasn't kidding."

"And we're stuck on this wild goose chase," Johnny says glumly. The Eye in the Sky drones relay info about which routes are backed-up. They aren't always great about detail when it comes to anything smaller than a Prius. He fully expects it to be a pile of trash bags, or maybe a passed-out wino. Meanwhile, there are all those people at the Triskelion in need of help....

He loses the coin toss, and has to trek from the road to the site where the Eye has spotted whatever it is. 

Wonder of wonders, the Eye is right. There _is_ someone on the riverbank, and when the paramedic gets a look at him, he gives a low whistle and calls Ramirez to come in with a collapsible stretcher. Then he goes to work. 

The man is unmistakably Steve Rogers, Captain America. Johnny's been to the Smithsonian exhibit, he's read about him being frozen in the Arctic ice for seventy years, and fighting aliens in New York--and here he is, in bad shape. 

"Better bring oxygen," he advises his partner. The guy's lungs are super congested, and his pulse is thready. Johnny rests his hand on the star at the center of his chest, "feeling" for the problem. 

Water in his lungs, for starters. Johnny taps into his gift and focuses on the clogged lungs. To his astonishment, when his tries to "push", whatever they reinforced the supersoldier with pushes back. That's a first. He tries again, doing his best to finesse it, to time his energy pulse to match the slow heartbeat and labored breathing. This time, he's rewarded with a gush of water as Rogers exhales. He's gasping and sputtering...his heartbeat grows steadier as Johnny subtly supports him. 

He's still pale. There are raw patches on his face--if it had been anyone else, Johnny would have guessed that somebody beat the hell out of him. But nobody could get the better of Captain America like this--he must have been injured by the alleged explosion, although he seems to be well away from the tower...it's more shock than injury, Johnny diagnoses. He should pull through. 

They get their patient stable, deliver him to the hospital, and head to the Triskelion, where there are others being recovered from the rubble: a woman with a compound leg fracture from falling down a flight of stairs, a man on one of the upper floors who's been badly burned. They're busy all day with them and others. It's only when they stop by the station to pick up more supplies that they get relief. Second shift is coming in, and the boss says go home. 

Johnny's happy to comply. He has to think about when he last ate...they slid through a drive-thru just before the last run of their first shift. Not quite ten hours ago, but it feels like days. Belatedly, he remembers Jasper, whom he hopes is still holding his own. He'd better pick up some take-out on the way home. 

...


End file.
